by WILLIAM GOULD
In January 1950, Mohammad Ismail, the Pakistani High Commissioner for India, made a statement, reproduced in the Lucknow newspaper Tanvir, that he was not actually a Pakistani national and had no intention of becoming one. Mohammad Ismail, a UP Muslim, had not physically migrated to Pakistan but believed that he could nevertheless represent the Pakistani state. This controversy was one of the key points of discussion in the Pakistan Constituent Assembly as it debated the Citizenship Bill for the fixing of the definition of citizenship for government servants (pp. 176-7). These discussions encapsulated in a single moment, some of the ambiguities and contradictions surrounding citizenship that are so well captured by The Long Partition. On the one hand, Zamindar deliberately uses the term ‘displacement’ rather than ‘migration’ (p. 7), to stress the ways in which her subjects were at once neither ‘insiders’ or ‘outsiders’ in a process in which national belonging was incomplete, contingent and ambivalent. The Long Partition really does ‘write on the border’, exploring the unevenness of research in two nation-states, by focussing on the cities of Karachi and Delhi. On the other hand, Zamindar upsets the idea of 1947 as a specific moment of transition in which the relations between the two states was decided, and more importantly when political freedom and the rights of citizens were theoretically determined. Instead, Zamindar takes the life histories of her subjects further into the early 1950s, to suggest that the process of partition and the displacements it entailed extended well beyond the boundaries of state crisis hitherto set out by scholars.
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